MARK RIFKIN. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History
of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012). 440 pp., $99 (cloth), $35 (paper).

Mark Rifkin's second monograph, When Did Indians Become
Straight, is an intellectually rigorous and theoretically dense work
that explores the relationship between Indigenous political formations
and heteronormativity by presenting a literary history of sexuality that
spans the last two centuries. Rifkin argues that the settler
state's investment in, and enforcement of, heterosexuality as the
basic organizing structure of society is a response to the fact that
"Indigeneity puts the state in crisis by raising fundamental
questions about the legitimacy of its (continued) existence" (37).
As a result, Indigenous geopolitical alliances that exceed liberal state
logics of what counts as "proper governance" are interpellated
as "aberrant or anomalous modes of (failed) domesticity" in an
political economy of privatization, where heterosexual coupling is
portrayed as a natural expression of "the family" (37). Rifkin
demonstrates that "heteroconjugality" is the condition of
possibility for political intelligibility within United States
institutions for Native people. On the one hand, United States
discourses of sexuality, work to selectively recognize Native social
forms that align with liberal settler frameworks, and on the other they
mark Indigenous difference as a threat to the national order. Therefore
Indigenous political subjectivity, defined by affective networks of
kinship relations, not only falls outside the scope of settler political
reality, but it actively challenges the state's continued
legitimacy by insisting on the preexistence of polities external to the
state.

Rifkin also interrogates the ways in which Native social formations
have been divorced from their inherent implications for Indigenous
sovereignty and co-opted as queer alternatives to those opposed to
heterosexual hegemony. Using the popularity of Two Spirit identity as an
example, Rifkin illustrates how contemporary queers uphold Native
sociopolitical formations as a "resource" to help non-Natives
to articulate a more inclusive vision of society. In doing so, they
position kinship networks (and Native peoples) as fitting comfortably
within the political landscape of the United States, rather than
engaging with Native nations as discrete polities or recognizing the
havoc wreaked on those same networks by United States policy.

Throughout the book, Rifkin develops a queer methodology that
depends on a critical redeployment of sovereignty and kinship--one that
not only acknowledges how both terms can mark the interpellation of
Native people into the heteronormative structures of the settler state,
but also how they can also be used to stretch the terms of United Stats
legal discourse to account for collective geopolitical alliances
exterior to the state.

The book consists of three chronologically organized sets of paired
chapters, the first of which examines novels written in the 1820s, in
order to illustrate the imposition of heterosexual logics of inherited
racial "blood" that superseded preexisting geopolitical
kinship dynamics. The second set of chapters looks at how Native writers
contested attempts by the General Allotment Act and the Indian
Reorganization Act to "detribalize" Native people by imposing
heteronuclearity and rendering Native governance consistent with settler
ideologies. Rifkin's analysis suggests that while these authors
insisted on the validity and coherence of kinship networks as political
formations, they fell prey to what he calls the "bribe of
straightness"--seeking legitimacy from the state by disavowing
aspects of Native social formations that did not align with the
heteroconjugal norm. The fourth and fifth chapters use contemporary
texts to depict the appropriation of depoliticized versions of
Indigenous kinship forms by non-Native queers in ways that obscure the
ongoing presence of Native peoples and the connection between
sociocultural formations and struggles for Native self-determination.
Conversely, this final section also addresses the modern queer Native
critique that links Native homophobia to the intrusions of US imperial
policy, and insists on the coherence of longstanding clan networks as
form of peoplehood.

While Rifkin's work is a significant accomplishment in its own
right, it also serves as a valuable addition to the developing body of
work that combines Queer Studies and Native Studies. Recent works by
Jennifer Denetdale, Quo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Gilley, Scott
Lauria Morgensen, and Andrea Smith also link the operation of
heteronormativity to settler colonialism and the denial of Indigenous
sovereignty. In When Did Indians Become Straight, Rifkin critiques Queer
Theory for its unacknowledged investment in settler colonialism,
pointing out that queer challenges to heteroconjugality as the
determining factor for the organization of resource distribution still
position the settler state as the appropriate distributor of resources.
Instead he advocates for a queer critique of heteronormativity that
contests, rather than presumes, the existence of the nation state, and
centers Indigenous peoples. While it could be argued that the
book's considerable length limits its utility in the undergraduate
classroom, its analytical depth and expansive scope certainly justify
the extra pages. Overall, When Did Indians Become Straight represents a
major intellectual feat and an important contribution to the fields of
Native, Queer, and Literary Studies.

Reviewed by: Lindsey Schneider

University of California

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